It costs more than three times as much to publish an article in a humanities or social-science journal as it does to publish one in a science, technical, or medical, or STM, journal, and the prevailing model used by many publishers of STM journals will not work for their humanities and social-sciences counterparts. Those are some of the eye-opening conclusions released today in a report on an in-depth study of eight flagship journals in the humanities and social sciences.

The report, "The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations," was conducted by Mary Waltham, an independent publishing consultant, at the request of a committee organized by the National Humanities Alliance in 2007. The panel was charged with trying to understand how the rapid evolution of scholarly communication, particularly the rise of open access, will affect the alliance's members, many of which are scholarly societies that rely on traditional subscription models to run their publishing operations. ...

"The cost per article of publishing in the humanities and social sciences appears to be almost four times the cost of publishing in the STM field," [William E. Davis, chairman of the committee and executive director of the American Anthropological Association] said in an interview. "That creates a very different dynamic for figuring out models to support our programs."

One model not likely to provide that support is the "author-pays" approach, in which scholars come up with money to help journals cover the costs of publishing their articles. That template works well enough in STM fields, in which grant money is easier to come by—not the case in the chronically underfunded fields covered by the study. ...

The study also appears to undermine the notion that doing away with print "would make the open-access model financially viable," the panel noted. So-called first-copy costs—"collecting, reviewing, editing, and developing content"—added up to about 47 percent of the total outlay among the eight journals studied. Abolishing print versions of the journals would reduce costs, the study found, but not enough. ...

Does that mean that the scholarly associations that participated in the study reject the idea of open access? Not at all, Mr. Davis said. Instead, the findings are "pointing us away from author-pays open access" toward figuring out what other open-access models could work for humanities and social-sciences journals. That's the next step. Will learned societies that publish such journals figure out how to take that step? "We will," Mr. Davis said, "because we have to." ...

The report is not yet online.

Posted by
Gavin Baker at 8/14/2009 05:08:00 PM.

The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.